I don’t support society functioning like that in Mad Max, so I assume you are confused.
Yes, please. Go send Bubba McBeergut and his buddies up against the U.S. infantry. Dibs on the popcorn concession.
(Yeah, the U.S. military did such a bad job with the Taliban that these Afghan bad-asses basically hit out, laid low, occasionally set off an IED for shits and giggles, for twenty years, and waited for us to get tired of playing Empire Builder.)
Every time some gun fetishist points to the 2nd as justification to throw an insurrectionist hissy-fit, I point to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which the 2nd explicitly does not supercede:
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To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
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The 2nd might have had some relevance in 1790. So did smallpox.
I also firmly want it understood—I am 100% willing to trade more deaths for gun rights.
So there is a definitive limit to “more”. How may exactly is that?
I don’t think you’re remembering correctly. For the avoidance of doubt, my position is this:
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Gun laws in this country need to be tightened to make it more difficult for unstable and/or psychopathic individuals to acquire guns. In some states, this means gun laws need to be tightened a lot.
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As Seung-Hui Cho (32 victims at Virginia Tech) and Omar Mateen (49 victims at Pulse Nightclub, Florida) proved, you don’t need assault rifles to commit mass murder. In fact, the majority of mass shooters use handguns. Therefore, the only way to truly minimize mass shootings in this country is to ban all guns. Banning AR-15s alone just isn’t going to cut it.
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Banning all guns is undesirable, for two reasons: Firstly, it deprives people of a potentially life-saving means of self-defense. For instance, a few years ago an acquaintance once used a handgun to ward off a violently abusive ex-partner. She explicitly bought the gun to protect herself from him. If she hadn’t, who knows what might’ve happened to her? Stories like this are hardly rare. Secondly, banning guns deprives citizens of a powerful means of resisting a tyrannical government, should one ever become ascendant.
I don’t think these are remotely controversial stances.
Actually, that’s not correct. I quote myself, from earlier in the thread:
" SenorBeef has said everything I would’ve said and more besides. The only thing I would add, just for the record, is that I’m not averse to sensible gun control measures such as more stringent background checks, longer waiting periods, or red flag laws. And I definitely think gun regulations are far too lax in some states. However, I don’t think an outright gun ban (or a collection of regulations so stringent that they form a de facto gun ban) is desirable or workable." - post 264.
But that’s what guerrilla insurgencies always do. The five principles of guerrilla warfare are: intelligence, ambush, deception, sabotage, and espionage. The point is to bleed the enemy dry over long (sometimes extremely long) periods of time. We only got tired of playing empire builder because their strategy worked, and it was a strategy against which all the high-tech weaponry in the world was rendered basically useless. I don’t see why a similar strategy couldn’t be successfully utilized by a civilian resistance army battling a tyrannical government here in the US.
If true, that would be an astounding achievement 
I’m not going to argue with your interpretation of the ruling, or your opinion of Heller. The point I was trying to substantiate was merely that my interpretation of the Second Amendment (be it right or even wildly wrong) wasn’t a fringe interpretation.
Clearly I did misremember Walter’s position, and I apologize for that.
For the same reason that the Taliban isn’t gonna pack up and leave Afghanistan now that they’re in charge just because some other group of afghanis doesn’t like them. If the tyrannical US gov meets resistance at home, it will crack down, not pack up and go home. This is because they’re already home.
Statistically a gun is much more likely to kill you than to save your life. You are welcome to dispute this, to not like it because it doesn’t line up with your worldview, or to consider it irrelevant because God said guns are a fundamental right so it doesn’t matter if they are useful for self defense or not. What you CANNOT do is claim that guns make you safer and expect anyone who doesn’t already agree that guns are a fundamental right to be convinced.
This is laughably wrong, as has been pointed out numerous times.
Well, that’s the rub, though. It’s true that statistically the AVERAGE person becomes less, rather than more, safe through acquiring a gun. I think that making this fact more widely known should be a high priority.
But if you are, say, living in a gang-infested neighborhood and/or have an abusive ex-spouse stalking you and/or are a public figure who gets a lot of death threats, you might reasonably feel that in your specific non-“average” situation, a gun would in fact make you safer.
Agreed, although I don’t know how much good spreading this info around would do. It’s not like it is a secret now, and humans are notoriously bad at analyzing risk, especially to themselves.
Your (General Your 
) own assessment of risk (and more specifically your assessment of whether a gun would make you safer or not) is probably among the least reliable assessments of risk we could find. Like I said before - people are absolutely terrible at risk assessment.
That’s why I’m in favor of licensing for firearms, on a may issue basis. If there is a legitimate reason why you need a specific type of firearm (for use in pest control, for legal hunting, for security when transporting goods that make you a particular target - say, armored truck cash delivery driver - or even, in very special circumstances, because you have a valid need for a firearm for self defense) you can apply for a license and then buy your gun.
Banning all guns is undesirable because farmers need guns for pest control, hunting seems like a perfectly cromulent activity, and with appropriate regulation and oversight, there’s no reason people shouldn’t enjoy target shooting, too.
As @Babale already pointed out, it’s highly unlikely that a gun will actually make you safer. You have an anecdote about a friend who bought a gun to protect herself from an ex. I suspect a reinforced door with a good lock would have been a better purchase, and that she’s better off staying far away from him than waving a gun in his proximity. But I don’t know the details. I do know that in my family there have been no uses of guns for self defense, but one suicide that likely wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been a handgun handy-by, and one accidental shooting that certainly wouldn’t have led to the death of a healthy young woman if that gun hadn’t been handy-by. (Both the police and her family believed that her boyfriend shot her in a tragic accident, so I believe them.)
As for protecting ourselves from tyranny… that’s a fantasy. But out of curiosity, where do you stand on the regulation of the raw materials that go into IEDs and government surveillance of the citizenry?
“Wasn’t a fringe interpretation” where, by what standards? Both those rulings were certainly considered fringe interpretations by four out of the nine jurists who vehemently argued against them – that is, by all jurists who were not Republican appointees beholden to gun nuts; they were considered fringe interpretations by constitutional scholars who argued that they were egregiously wrong and the result of predetermined ideological outcomes, and they would certainly be considered fringe interpretations by the standards of every civilized democracy on the planet that is not the United States.
Of course, just like @Martin_Hyde, I’m sure you don’t give a damn what the rest of the civilized world is doing, but then you are complicit in the inevitable deadly consequences. Since 1963, 193,000 children have been killed by guns in America. In a CDC study, more American children were killed by guns during the study period on a per-capita basis than in the 12 other comparable countries in the study combined. You are obviously onside with @Martin_Hyde in agreeing that all those deaths are well worth it to support your murderous hobby.
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Very very well put.
This is also my understanding of the 2nd Amendment. It’s specifically to prevent Congress from abusing its power to regulate the militias by disarming them completely, as the British attempted to disarm the colonists in 1775. And I can’t reasonably construe the text as having any other effect.
I see the federal government’s ability to federalize the national guard by drafting them into the regular army and navy (when not “actually invaded” as the Constitution requires for Presidential command of the militias) as a blaring loophole to the spirit of the Constitution, which makes the 2nd Amendment entirely unjustified.
~Max
If “unlimited” is the word that makes the excerpted sentence a lie (or a distortion, or both), that suggests that that there is an upper limit to the number of dead children you’ll trade.
Could you share what that number is, please?
In lieu of that, might you consider stepping back from the characterization?
This is why the Second Amendment is a great example of the logical flaws in originalism.
The framers and equally importantly all the people who ratified the constitution didn’t all agree on what they wanted out of all of these apparent contradictions. When the law has constructive ambiguity, there is no right answer based on what the people who made the law wanted.
My flavor of originalism only uses period definitions for the words and phrases, it goes no further.
~Max
Oh yeah you unavoidably do need to factor that stuff in.
An interesting thing to do given that by that period’s definition a “well regulated militia” is in no way, simply, an armed rabble.
See my point about you being a piece of shit.
And neither is mine. ???
~Max